Anthropology, Ethnography and Massive Codesign for Complex Services

Anthropologists have a tense relationship with rapid design-oriented ethnography. Although applied ethnography has extracted anthropology from the enclosure of a purely academic discipline and projected it at the forefront of practically all digital development and service design, anthropologists often feel there is an undue reduction of methods and theory leading to an extreme simplification of the social sphere. This tension is often discussed (Baba, 2005; Ingold, 2017) and is an undercurrent of much of the bridging work done by associations such as EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference).